The Hindu : Taliban leaders active in Pak.

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, May 28, 2002

International

International

Taliban leaders active in Pak.

Peshawar May 27. Two former high-ranking Taliban leaders talk of reorganising their militant religious movement and describe a recovering Al-Qaeda — all the while they sit secretly inside Pakistan, Washington's front-line ally in the war on international terrorism.

In an interview with The Associated Press, they said the Afghan-Pakistan border can't be sealed to stop the movement of militants.

Even more advantageous, they said, was the split within Pakistan's powerful spy agency between those who share the Taliban's ideology and those who support Pakistan's alliance with America.

One of the two, Fazul Rabi Said-Rahman, was the Taliban's army corps commander for eastern Afghanistan. During the last six months of Taliban rule he was chief of police in Paktia province, an area still considered by the U.S.-led anti-terrorist coalition to be harbouring fugitive Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters.

The other man, Obeidullah, was an assistant to the Taliban's intelligence chief, Qari Ahmadullah, who was killed by a U.S. bomb in January in eastern Afghanistan.

Speaking in Pashtu through an interpreter, they said the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and Al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, are both alive, but offered no specifics on the Saudi dissident who leads Al-Qaeda. They said that they had met with Omar within the last two months ``in the mountains in Afghanistan.''

They did not claim to have seen Osama or explain how they knew he was alive. ``He is waiting for the next big attack and then he will show his body,'' Obeidullah said.

Both men warned of suicide attacks on the United States and Britain in retaliation for the war in Afghanistan, but again offered no specifics.

In an earlier meeting with Associated Press, Obeidullah had made a similar vague warning about a suicide attack. He said at the second meeting that he was speaking of the May 8 bus bombing in Karachi that killed 14 people, including 11 French engineers who were in Pakistan to build an Agosta submarine for the Pakistani navy.

``Before the Karachi attack I said something was being planned, something would happen in Pakistan,'' Obeidullah said. He said the attack was staged by Al-Qaeda and Pakistanis opposed to the President, Pervez Musharraf's support for the U.S.

Said-Rahman said some Pakistani groups were working with Al-Qaeda against the coalition and against Gen. Musharraf.

``Everyone is working together - Harakat-ul Jihad, Harakat-ul Mujahedeen, Al-Qaeda,'' he said, referring to two Pakistani-based Islamic extremist groups that have been outlawed by Gen. Musharraf. — AP

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